Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

What You've Heard, It's All True  
Sheera Talpaz

In certain spiders the female carries the eggs about with her in a silken case until they hatch. She is much larger and stronger than the male and may kill and devour him after copulation, as does an insect, the praying mantis, around which has crystallized the myth of devouring femininity—the egg castrates the sperm, the mantis murders her spouse, these acts foreshadowing a feminine dream of castration. —Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

I am the broken, burning bed.
You grow drowsy.

I am the venom of us.

The city has its perils --
the woman, her pearls,

this woman, her pleasures,
her pills, plied with it.

Lord, the lies resound.
The flies abound over

this marshland. I am
flooded, am fickle.

Will I be forgotten?

I am the filthy city.
The slattern under lanterns.

I spit.
It's backwards crying.

 

Sheera Talpaz is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Michigan, where she received a Hopwood Award in poetry. Her essays and poetry have appeared in The Rumpus, The Collagist, Euphony, and La Petite Zine. She lives in Chicago.